


Like Walking Into a Dream

by SegaBarrett



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Afterlife, Backstory, F/M, Minor Character Death, Mother-Daughter Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-02
Updated: 2015-04-02
Packaged: 2018-03-20 20:48:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3664425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A few days in the life and afterlife of Layla Rourke.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Walking Into a Dream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wicked_wyvern](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wicked_wyvern/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural, and I make no money from this.
> 
> A/N: Title is from "Afterlife" by Avenged Sevenfold.

Layla pulled the comb down over her hair. At least with all of this, she got to keep her hair. It could be worse, couldn’t it?

That was how she made herself feel better these days – she just focused on the positive and thought of the nice things. Of the good things.

Like the feel of her fingers in her hair. It was fluffy, it was soft. Sometimes people commented on it, told her how nice she looked.

On her good days, she told them “thank you”. On her bad ones, she didn’t know what to say. She would forget where she was walking, what she was doing. If there was somewhere that she was supposed to be.

“Morning, Layla.”

She smiled back at her mother. It was the least she could do. Whatever dreams the woman had for herself, she had abandoned to help care for Layla in her time of need. She had even brought her to that preacher, had begged for his help… even though that had come to naught.

Well, not completely to naught. There had been Dean.

She had been surprised, the way he made her heart beat a little faster. The way he made it a little hard for her to stand up straight.

She closed her eyes. It made her tired, just standing up. But when she thought of Dean… when she thought of the moments when he had looked into her eyes, the moments in which she had had hope…

Hope had been too small a commodity in her life lately, but not always. She had joy once, but she had never been in love. She had found that spark in the sky, in the ladybugs flying around her, the butterflies perching on the flowers, the sun setting on a particularly productive day.

It had always been something she had put off. She had told herself that love would come in time, that she would meet the “right” person, and then it would be all sunshine and daisies and hand-holdings.

One never plans on finding out that they’re only going to live to age thirty, especially not when they’re a teenager.

She and her mother had never gotten along, not back then. They’d always bickered about things, and Layla could remember throwing things, screaming, calling her a bitch and every other awful name in the book.

Now, she put her finger to her eye to try to stop the tears before they began.

They were close enough now to be the same woman in two different lives.

***

Layla’s father had never wanted anything to do with her. Her parents had already gotten divorced by the time she came along, and the man had been long gone. Something about a beach house in Malibu.

She had wished him well. But she’d wished she could have got to know him, too. She had pictured him coming to her birthday parties, figured maybe he’d show up to walk her down the aisle at her wedding.

The wedding that was never going to happen.

She had given up on all that when she had received the diagnosis. She had started to live in minutes instead of days – if these ten minutes were okay, well then, everything was going to be all right. Every hour that she wasn’t dead yet was an hour in which she’d won.

The faith healer, putting his hands on her head and whispering words she wished she could believe, granting her some kind of second chance.

But the second chance had only happened for Dean.

She couldn’t help but wonder, even now, if Dean had been her second chance.

***

They’d been on the news, the Winchester brothers. Layla’s mother hadn’t recognized them. It made sense, why would she? It had been part of another volley of disappointments in a never-ending spree.

That day had been one of Layla’s good days, and she’d been sitting on the couch eating popcorn and watching Gilmore Girls when the news came on. They were wanted for murder. Anyone who had any information should call a hotline, and they would receive a hefty reward.

Layla had laughed, and her mother had asked what she was laughing at.

“Nothing,” she’d told her. “I was just wondering about something. Someone.”

Someone that I used to know, she almost said. But had she really known him? Had it been smoke and mirrors or something else?

Certainly, they weren’t murderers. But they were something. Something Layla didn’t have the words to describe, not even on her best of days.

***

It was one of the bad days when she closed her eyes and saw Dean Winchester’s face. His eyes were so wide, so brown, and she knew in the moment that everything the news had said about him was wrong, but also that everything she’d thought she knew about him was wrong, too.

He seemed to glide between this life and the next, the place that she was going to go before long. In months, in weeks maybe. The doctors couldn’t make up their mind.

Let them try to figure out Dean, she thought to herself. Her head was aching, and she moved her fingers up to rest on the temples, to rub them. She hummed to herself. Her mother was in the other room, cooking dinner. Trying to find normalcy in all of this.

She let her fingers roam over her body and she saw Dean’s face, looking down at her. He didn’t speak in the dream, simply looked.

She hadn’t found words to put to it yet. She didn’t know what kind of words he would say when he hadn’t just come back from the dead.

***

Layla hadn’t had a lot of female friends growing up. She had always kept to herself, sitting in fields and picking dandelions. There was something beautiful about them, even though they were so common.

When they went to seed, Layla and the other kids in her neighborhood called them “wishies”. The magic of a “wishie” was simple – you blew on it and you made a wish, and the petals would spiral through the air and somehow, that would make your wish come true.

Layla used to pick wishie after wishie and come up with bigger and better wishes.

She forgot about most of them as she got older, as grade school fell away into middle school; periods and boys and dances that she wanted to go to but was too afraid to dance at. Then middle school became high school with prom and college applications, standardized tests and flashing the biggest, brightest smile in all of the school photos.

Then it was college. Roommates. Dorms with pictures hanging on the walls. Calls and visits home.

Realizing that her mother had always been her best friend, even when she had been her worst enemy.

Lying back on the top bunk of a bed in a dorm, looking up at a poster and wondering, as a radiator rattled, if this had been what she had wished for. Whether this was the seed coming back home.

***

There was rain beating on the window, going rat-tat-tat.

Layla couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t even move her fingers to scratch the itch on her thigh.

She shut her eyes.

This was it.

Her mother was calling her name in the distance.

She tried to turn her head.

***

“Sometimes I’m here. But sometimes I’m not.”

Layla woke up in mid-conversation with Dean Winchester.

“What do you mean?”

She ran her hands through her hair. It felt soft. 

“I mean I’ve been through Hell, I’ve been through Purgatory. And now it’s Heaven. For now. I’m never in one place for very long.”

“It’s like a dream,” she commented. The sky was very blue.

Dean took her hand.

“Sometimes it is,” he agreed. “Sometimes it all is.”

“Is this how it ends?” Layla asked him. She put a hand on his head. Little bits of his hair, tiny and black, were falling all over her fingers.

“I think this is how it ends.”

She looked down.

They were sitting in a field of dandelions.


End file.
